Back in 2015, I stumbled upon this show called Mad Men (best TV show on marketing). My cousin’s friend called me and asked, “Adnan, do you know Photoshop? Do you want to start a marketing agency?” Knowing absolutely nothing about it, the only right answer was, “Hell yeah!”

After working 9 years, managing hundreds of clients (some of the biggest brands in the country and some starting from scratch), recruiting, training, and managing hundreds of brilliant people, and experiencing many hard learnings and proud moments, these are the absolute gems I’ve picked up along the way:

1. What is Not Marketing?

Branding is not marketing.
Branding is about creating a consistent experience that reinforces your values and builds trust at every stage of the customer journey. The uniform, the packaging, the content; every touchpoint is an opportunity. If you want to know more about creating a brand strategy that combines brand identity, story, positioning, and pricing to construct a brand bible, let me know in the comments.

Sales is not marketing.
Marketing is responsible for customer perception and generating leads. Sales is about converting those leads into paying customers. From setting up a CRM for a systematic approach, coming up with a compelling script to Customer Experience Optimization, if you want to know more about sales, let me know in the comments!

2. Curation is King / Skyscraper Technique

This method helped us generate 17 million views for our clients in the last few months.

In my SEO days, I learned this technique called the skyscraper technique. It’s a method of producing the best possible content by opening up all the results of Google’s first page and combining the best parts of all those pages, then adding something more to it.

We can apply the same concept to social media content by looking at the best-performing content internationally and from our competitors, and reproducing them with local context and relatability. Forget blatant copying; this technique ensures you cover a topic from every angle imaginable to provide the most value to the end users while knowing what has worked well for others.

3. Marketing Funnels

This is probably the single most important thing I’ve learned about marketing in the last 9 years.

Understanding the purchase decision-making process and every touchpoint a customer goes through before pulling the trigger is key to influencing them. Just like how you don’t talk to your family like your acquaintances and to strangers like your acquaintances, marketing communications also requires a different approach to people who just came to know you, people who already know you, and people who are about to make the purchase.

• What triggers them to even look for something like this? (e.g., hunger, sleepiness, viewing an ad)
• Where do they search, and what do they compare you to?
• Which content creators do they follow? Where do they get their news?
• How do they decide you’re the one? (e.g., price, functionality, post-sales service, warranty, etc.)

Hack: Add an additional step of Customer Delight after the purchase is made where you go over and beyond to provide value to the customer. This builds loyalty.

4. After Running $100,000 on Ads

I can confirm that any ad performance can be boiled down to 3 things, and optimizing them will give you the best results:

• The offer: This is the product and the price/deal you’re offering the potential customers. If this isn’t great, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure.
• The audience: The target audience. Usually better when warmer customer audiences are used and frequently populated to avoid exhaustion.
• The ad: The creative/reel/copy, basically whatever creative you’re promoting.

Experiment with variations before going all in on your budget.

Hack: The most important metric is the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend, basically how much you’re making back from every dollar spent) to understand what’s working and what’s not.

5. Measure the ARE Framework

It’s important to measure to know what’s working so you can do more of that and less of what’s not working. Most KPIs are overrated. This is what I use:

• Acquisition: How much does each new customer cost? (CAC, CPA, LTV)
• Retention: Are they sticking around? (Retention rate, Reviews, Repeat buys, AOV)
• Engagement: Is anyone even paying attention? (CTR, Conversion rates, Social media engagement, Bounce rate)

Google these terms to find the full forms, then check yours. Find benchmarks for your industry, then compare and improve.

Hack: Integrate Upsells and Cross-sells to increase LTV.

6. Judge a Book by its Cover

That’s what copywriting is about.

The principles:

1. Urgency: “Price goes up tomorrow.”
2. Scarcity: “There are only 5 spots left.”
3. Authority: “Used by NAVY SEALS.”
4. Proof: “35,000+ email subscribers on this list.”

The formatting:

1. Header: Getting attention.
2. Body: Explaining the benefits of the promotion (why the audience should care).
3. Call to action: Now that you have their attention and convinced them to care, tell them what to do (e.g., order now!).

Survey/research to find the top desires, fears, dreams, and frustrations of your customers. This will allow you to write powerful copies that convert.

Hack: Relevant adjectives are your best friend.

7. Rule of 7

The Rule of 7 is a marketing concept that suggests people need to be exposed to your brand or message at least 7 times before they are likely to buy from you. Our brains are bombarded daily; effective repetition is key.

Whether it’s retargeting ads, appearing on influencer content, a text message/email, or a billboard, figure out the most effective repetitions of exposures to your audience.

8. Great Collaborations Breed Creativity

Whether you’re working with editors or creators, great work comes from mutual respect and authentic relationships. Fostering them will go further than any hack.

9. Bonus:

If you made it this far, you’re probably very interested, and for you, I have a bonus.

When everyone starts doing it, it stops working; that also means you have to be willing to do things no one is doing to get ahead of the curve.

For example, product-content fit is a new idea where you tell the story of the product (e.g., how you came up with it, the challenges you faced, and how you overcame them) and that becomes the content that sells the product.

A good example is the 30-day challenges that people are doing now where, on the 30th day, they disclose the key part of their journey. It makes them relate to your journey and trust you enough to want to buy your product.

Since I’m cramming in a bunch of points together, it’s hard to get deep into a single topic. If you want me to dive deeper, comment and let me know.